Supervillain Honeymoon
by Marnie
Summary: Following their surprise marriage in Alfheim, Steve has to introduce the Avengers to his new wife, and Lady Loki has to set her mind at rest about the consequences of a certain broken vow.
1. Chapter 1

This follows on from StarTrekFanWriter's "What Happens in Alfheim (stays with you the rest of your natural born life)" and _that_ follows on from my "A Kindness Repaid." I recommend reading both of those first if you want to understand Loki's motivation in this, and why everyone's so worried about Thor. But if you don't fancy that, suffice it to say that Steve and Lady Loki have woken up after a night of carousing in Alfheim to find themselves unexpectedly and irrevocably married...

o.0.o

The next time he awoke, Steve was alone in the bed. There was a clink of metal, a scent of warm raspberries and fresh bread. When he raised himself to an elbow, looked out at the rest of the room, he found his wife – his _wife_, how about that? – setting out covered plates of breakfast on the low table.

She'd swapped her evening gown for something a little more Asgardian, but it wasn't the armour she wore as a man: Skin tight green leather trousers and tall boots with a little kick heel, a blouse that was half corset, half plate mail, yet still did nothing to conceal that magnificent cleavage. She must have just come from the bath, for her raven hair was beginning to dry into tumbled curls. Golden ornaments clipped into it shimmered as she moved and were echoed by the delicate golden chains she'd wound around her hips.

And how strange it was – yet why was it strange? – that she looked so womanly, so comfortable in that body, when (he?) had looked so confident, so elegantly, deadly male in the other.

Somehow the prospect of getting up, eating, bathing, moving on with his life brought everything home to Steve. When they had woken up first, she'd obviously got there ahead of him in terms of figuring out what a God damned mess this had made of both their lives. He'd been too busy reassuring her to think deeply himself. And then there had been the sex.

She'd led him through that with patient, imaginative and unsparingly detailed instruction. He'd been too distracted, split between excitement and cringing embarrassment to worry about anything else, though the thought of where she must have acquired her encyclopaedic knowledge still disturbed him more than a little. But now, now there were no more distractions and the sheer enormity of the rest of his married life clamoured for his attention.

As he slid out of bed, she looked up and smiled. No tears any more, this was the inscrutable smile he was used to from his friend – the one that said "I know something you don't. It's ever so funny, but I don't feel inclined to share."

"You seem," he tried, feeling the situation sifting through his fingers like sand, "a bit more yourself. Is it OK if I... if I get cleaned up?"

"Of course," she sat with the same quiet graciousness she had used when (he?) had rescued Steve that first time, healed and restored him in (her?) supervillain lair. "I'll leave you at least half of breakfast, though if you take too long it will be the worst half."

Last night, when they'd been dancing together, even this morning when she wept like any ordinary woman, he had been able to think of her as a separate entity – a pretence, a disguise put on by his friend that was different in some fundamental way from the real thing.

But with her poise restored, the riddles back in those green eyes and the twist of that habitual smile – even on lips redder and fuller than he was used to – it was becoming harder to keep the two versions apart, either in his head or his heart.

That shouldn't come as quite such a puzzle. Shaking his head, because he couldn't get the thoughts to settle into any kind of realisation, Steve swathed himself in a sheet and took his sudden attack of philosophy to the bath.

An elvish bath, shaped out of one huge diamond and lit by a skylight that allowed the sun to beam onto the pool and fill the room with rainbows that split and shattered and swam across the walls with every ripple of water. Steve's incipient dark mood couldn't survive the radiance, and after five minutes immersed in light he found all his misgivings dissolving away and a great buttery lake of satiated smugness taking their place.

OK so this was not how he'd imagined his future would go, but oh boy, it had its compensations.

He was whistling as he emerged and knelt by the table to discover he'd been left all of the bacon and the sausages, half of the bread, none of the raspberries, and about a half a mouthful of small beer sloshing forlornly on the bottom of the tankard. Watching him squint at it, she gave a winsome smile that worked on Steve a great deal better in her new form than it had in the old, and shrugged. "I forgot."

"So," Steve got water from the bathroom instead. It had a slight fizzy tang of sulphur and hot springs, but that only made it more refreshing. "Where do we go from here?"

"Firstly," she leaned forward onto her spread elbows and watched with apparent amusement as Steve's gaze slid from her interlaced fingers to her chest. Snapping her fingers in his face, she let her long sharp nails rest – half threat, half promise, just dimpling his lower lip.

"Firstly I destroy the Queen of Elfland for perpetrating this little joke on us." She narrowed her eyes as if finding it hard to pick between two equally stylish dresses. "And possibly grind her entire realm to dust under my heel. Conquer or annihilate? It's such a difficult choice."

And yeah, you know what, it suddenly became crystal clear to Steve that Loki as a woman was neither more nor less Loki than he ever had been.

He didn't quite know what to think about the fact that that came as something of a relief. So instead he focussed on the more familiar situation of being Loki's external conscience and gave a snort of laughter as if the suggestion could not possibly be taken seriously. "I'm pretty sure she did it because she thought it would be nice for you. Give you someone to talk to, you know? Someone to be on your side. She owes you, after all."

Loki's sideways jerk of the head made all the ornaments in her hair jingle. Her mouth went surly-hard. "She thought it would be nice for me if she placed _my only friend_ in mortal peril?"

"I'm sorry?" in the absence of a magical wardrobe of his own, Steve struggled back into his tux from last night. "I thought we'd agreed that 'married to Loki' was not a fate worse than death, so you could lay off the 'putting him down for his own good' thing."

Though Steve was probably Earth's greatest expert in the meaning of Loki's expressions, that wasn't saying much at the best of times. Less so now, when they had all become unfamiliar by virtue of her new face. But he was pretty certain he saw a flash of surprise before all the shutters slammed closed and she applied a smile stolen wholesale from the Mona Lisa.

A swooping fear, _Damn! Did she poison breakfast?_ was shouldered aside by concern. Ninety percent of the time, Steve knew Loki's mask concealed either "don't bother me now, I'm plotting the apocalypse," or "I am so hurt I can't bear you to see." Sometimes both at once. Steve didn't know which it was this time but he wasn't happy with either.

Kneeling next to her, he took her hands in his own. Long fingered hands that felt delicate and breakable in his larger grip. Not letting thoughts get in his way, he squeezed them gently, surprising her into looking at him. And under that luminous gaze, the beauty that made awe and lust tie his tongue in knots between them, it was a lot easier to carry on simply not thinking at all. "Hey. It's OK. Whatever it is, we're in this together. OK?"

She took a breath, her tight Asgardian top making it do interesting things to the mounds of her breasts, and her blankness passed into a look of such affection it startled him. There were actual dimples in her cheeks as she leaned in and kissed him soft on the corner of his mouth. "I have been worrying about how to shield you from my enemies," she said, in partial explanation.

"Most of your enemies _are_ SHIELD," Steve touched the corner of his mouth tentatively with his fingertips, feeling it curve up in a wondering smile. The sex had been great, of course, and he was very grateful for it, but this... this made him ache a little closer to the heart. She was capable of love – he knew that already – but this was the first time he'd let himself wonder if she was capable of loving _him_. "And they're my friends."

"Indeed. Perhaps you are right – the Avengers should be tackled first. The Queen of Elfland can wait to find out what I thought of her little surprise. I'm sure she will enjoy the anticipation almost as much as the eventual response."

"My wife the supervillain," Steve laughed, disturbed at himself for being so amused, but Loki seemed to take the sentence for rejection. She flinched, and Steve watched with concern as she backpedalled, covering her tracks, trying to pretend she'd never reached out and made an unguarded gesture of warmth.

"We do not have to tell them. It might be wiser not to. I can invent a reason, a dozen different reasons for changing sex, or give none at all, and we can continue as before. No need for them to know we are anything more than—"

And Steve couldn't stand to hear it any more. "I'm not ashamed of you." He pulled her into a fierce hug. After a while her arms unstiffened and rose to wrap around his waist. She tucked her face into the junction of his neck and shoulder, held on tight.

"I'm not ashamed," he repeated, more gently, and if perhaps there were elements of what he said that were not strictly true, he intended to make them true, fast as possible. "I'm proud to have you as my wife. I want to tell the guys straight away, and they'd better treat you right, because if they don't—"

She didn't raise her head, just murmured it into his collar. "I don't need your protection, Steve Rogers."

It made him want to laugh and cry at the same time. "I know you don't, sweetheart. I know. But you've got it anyway."

Steve had never been able to work out the principle behind the time difference between Alfheim and Earth. Last time, they'd been in Alfheim four days and four weeks had passed on Earth. This time they left in daylight the day after Steve's party and arrived at four am on the evening before. This – and a small invisibility spell - allowed them to get to Steve's room at the mansion without encountering anything more Avenger-like than a pair of Stark's discarded pajama bottoms lying crumpled in a sorry little heap just outside his door.

And since it was the middle of the night, and they were newlyweds, he was happy to be persuaded to put the big confrontation aside until the morning and concentrate on getting in some conscientious practice with his new life skill.

When the morning eventually came, and found him waking up alone in his single bed in his cheerless bachelor room, he surprised himself by feeling miserable at the thought that maybe it had all been some weird hallucination caused by Victor's pink cloud of doom. He scrubbed a hand through his hair and lurched out to the kitchen, in sore need of a coffee and someone to tell him he hadn't dreamed the whole thing.

Which was why, when he stumbled blearily into the scent of pancakes and syrup, found Loki up before him, with an apron on, and earbuds in her ears, singing along to Evanescence while she whisked eggs, his first reaction was to go over there and kiss her on the back of her neck. It took the choking, horrified laugh over by the fridge to alert him to Tony's presence, where he stood between the fridge and the door, barefoot in old jeans, with his dark hair spiky and the blue glow of the reactor shining through his shirt. "Oh shit," he said. "Don't tell me I saw what I just saw. I may never eat again."

Steve's super-hearing picked up the tiny creak of a high-tension crossbow from behind the other door. A faint scent of dusting powder and floral shampoo said that was Natasha. Casually, he placed himself between Loki and the door – if the bolt came, it would have to go through him.

"Is this going to be a regular thing?" he asked as Loki took her headphones out and turned to smile at him. "You getting up and cooking me breakfast, I mean."

It was a different Loki this morning – one he hadn't seen for some time. Several layers of concealment and sharpness the god had not used with Steve since their friendship began were back in place, more polished and cutting than ever. The little glint of manic laughter in her eyes told him she was having a fine time dancing on the edge of chaos – half terrified, half gleeful, altogether engaged. "It is a wife's task," she said, enunciating clearly so Tony could hear every word, "to rise before her husband and make the fire, milk the goats, collect the eggs and make all ready for his comfort. In the absence of goats, I am doing my best."

"Wife?" Natasha gave up on hiding, opened the other door and leaned her shoulder on the jamb, though the pocket-sized crossbow remained unwaveringly trained on Loki's heart, via Steve's kidneys.

"Indeed," Loki gave that half moon smile – the one that said "I don't suffer from being seriously deranged: I enjoy every moment of it." If possible, it looked even creepier on her more delicate face. She leaned around Steve's sheltering bulk, stretched out her left hand, fingers splayed, and waggled her wedding ring in front of Natasha's disbelieving eyes.

_Oh,_ Steve thought, retrieving a mug and the newly brewed dark black coffee that filled the percolator jug to the brim. _We're not going with the truth, then._ He took a sip and tried to not feel unprepared for this conversation, even though his teeth felt fuzzy and he wished he'd put on real trousers before leaving his room. _Of course we're not. Loki would die rather than admit he was tricked into anything. Besides, if I told them, they'd try to fix it and I'm not sure I want it fixed._

"Steve?" Tony asked, coming out of hiding and taking one of the seats. His eyebrows made a break for the ceiling when Loki put a cup down in front of him and poured him coffee too. "Something you want to tell us?"

Steve gave a sheepish grin and showed them his matching ring. "It was a kind of spur of the moment thing. But yeah. Everyone say hello to Mrs. Rogers."

Lured by coffee, Natasha took a moment to speak into the headset she was already wearing, and drifted over. Effortlessly, a full cup materialised in front of her, and a plate. Loki put down pancakes in front of everyone, and Tony, who had lost his eyebrows somewhere in his hair gave that sickened scoff again. "Shit. This gives a whole new meaning to 'sleeping with the enemy.' You do know he's not even really a woman, Cap? Right?"

"Wait a moment," Natasha had produced a small device from somewhere on her skin tight costume and was testing the pancakes for poison. She had the earnest look of someone determined to do the right thing. "We don't know that. Maybe she always was a woman, and that's what made her so angry. Asgard doesn't seem like it would be a good place to be transgender – all that macho Viking bullshit."

Checking the readings, she took up a fork and speared a mouthful of pancake, picked it up and pointed it at Loki, who was leaning against the cooker looking thoroughly entertained. "You're a villain and everything, but you still get to say what you are. So what is it? Are you male or female? Are you a man or a woman?"

"I can't believe we're having this fucking conversation," Stark muttered sotto voce, as the sound of running footsteps heralded the reinforcements arriving.

Loki flicked her hair over her shoulder and grinned. "Yes."

Natasha looked like someone had stomped on her cereal, and Steve tried not to laugh. "Loki's just Loki," he said, and got one luminous moment of gratitude over her head before both doors opened again.

Clint and Bruce came, shoulder to shoulder, through one. Through the other –it took watching Loki turn to diamond hardness to prompt Steve to get a hold of his own complex of fear and fury, just at the sound of the footfalls. How had he not thought that coming home meant subjecting her to _this_? Through the other door came Thor.


	2. Chapter 2

Steve's brain caught up with his fight or flight response and firmly told it to "sit down, soldier." The kitchen seemed to pass into breathless stasis for a beat. He had time to notice that while Loki always seemed fragile next to his brother – a cheetah next to a lion, a grey heron next to a swan – this time she really looked like he could break her by accident, just by shouting too loud.

Loki's female form carried over from her male one the slender elegance, the thin wrists and fingers, the fine bones. With her wide green eyes and pointed chin, all the refined lines of her face, she had an elfin look, delicate and fey. Altogether unsuitable for going up against the solid wall of muscle that was the god of Thunder. Just for a little while, as everything teetered on the lip of the future, Steve thought that even Thor would see it, would remember that you don't get to be the good guys by beating up on defenceless women.

But then Loki raised her chin, her mouth tipping up at the edges into a gleaming razor-blade of a smile. "Brother." And Thor's look of increasingly horrified shock flipped over into outrage.

"You..." he gave a bellow of fury and charged. Steve leapt up, put himself between Thor and Loki and was flung aside with one casual backswing of Thor's left hand. He flailed through a collection of chairs, knocking Natasha off her perch, both of them smacking together into the wall by the door, rolling and scrambling up together to draw in identical breaths at the sight of the brothers' touching reunion.

Thor had Loki by the neck, had picked her off the floor and was throttling her with one hand, the other fending off her attempts to claw his eyes out with her long nails. "What is this?" he shouted, and shook her like a puppet, "Do you have no care for your family at all? It is not enough for you to shame us all with your madness, but you must now parade your perversity in front of all nine realms?"

Steve looked around. The other Avengers appeared uncomfortable at this, shifting in their spots, avoiding each other's eyes. But Natasha had taken her seat again with an air of "not my problem," and no one would look at Steve. Well, damn them all.

He picked up one of the kitchen chairs and smashed it over Thor's back. "You let _my wife_ go, Thor. So help me, put her down _right now_!"

But Thor never looked away from Loki's face. She had managed to get him to loosen his grip enough for her to breathe and she was now laughing like a hyena, with tears streaming down her cheeks. "A _parade_! Dear brother what a marvellous thought. A parade for the Captain's wedding, with all of Midgard watching."

"We'll do it," Steve said, despite the fact that he hadn't actually been asked. But Loki didn't spare him a glance. It was pretty clear that for both of the Asgardians the rest of the universe had ceased to exist, and only they were left, wrapped together in tight, incestuous bonds of hatred and affection that had lasted a thousand years and would last a million more.

And it was pretty sick, wasn't it, to feel suddenly jealous that Loki didn't love him with the same intensity with which she hated her brother, but Steve put that down as a regret for another time as he seized the still-hot pancake pan from the stove and brought it down like an axe, edge-wise, on Thor's wrist.

Thor let go. Loki fell to her knees, supporting herself with one hand, while with the other she wiped her streaming eyes, her head bent and her inky hair fallen forwards to conceal her face. And Steve, Steve had seen this somewhere before. He went chill as though he were just waking up again from the Arctic ice, and then red hot, put his shoulder down and charged Thor, ramming him hard, forcing him to take three steps back and clatter to a stop against the table. "No! You don't touch her. You don't touch her ever again!"

Tony and Clint were at his elbows, Tony trying to prize him off Thor, Clint getting in between them, holding up both hands, palms out for peace.

"Thor?" her voice was rough, soft as a cat's paw, a sweet little alto awash with poison. She lifted her head with a very familiar defiance, bright and hard and so damn brave. They called her a coward in Asgard. Steve never could understand it.

"Do you remember what you did to me the last time we were in this place together, brother? Do you remember what I did afterwards, to repay you?"

Thor shuddered as though his righteous anger had taken the bone marrow out of him when it departed. There was a pair of matching cracks as his clutching hands broke the edge of the table. "You will not speak of that here!"

"Oh, will I not?" but this expression reminded Steve of her confession of what she'd like to do if she had Thor and a sharp knife in the same room. He remembered, belatedly, that the reason Thor was still on the team at all was that Loki could wipe the floor with all the other avengers, separately or combined. Just as they needed Thor to stop Loki, Loki was the only one in the room with even a half a chance of bringing Thor down.

Getting to her feet, she smoothed down her clothes and tossed her hair, setting all the ornaments ajingle. "Yet you seemed so eager to discuss my perversity. Did I ever tell you that I recorded the entire incident on several surveillance devices?"

Thor made an inarticulate noise of protest and actually backed up, taking the table with him. Loki followed him, stalking him – beautiful and cruel as ice. "As you so kindly point out, another depravity on my part will hardly raise an eyebrow at this stage. One can only sink so low. But you, my dearest brother? Imagine the reaction if _your_ shame were broadcast through every Midgardian TV screen, and through the scrying devices of every sorcerer in the nine realms. The crown prince of Asgard? Odin's precious favourite son? Why, Father would never be able to show his face in public again, and he so old and tired already. It would crush him."

And this was why Tony had been right, years ago, to say Loki's superpower was not his magic at all, but his words. As Steve watched the power shift between the two gods, sensed Thor recoil, as though stabbed through the gut, he had the time to wonder if this was why Thor always attacked first – because if Loki was allowed to speak at all, the damage was already done.

"You vile, treacherous _woman_. You mare in heat—" Thor's retreat halted as his temper flared again. It took Clint, Steve and Tony all together, braced as though trying to hold back a tank, to stop him from running in and getting his hands back around his sister's throat.

Loki didn't flinch. "You put this weapon into play between us, Thor," she sneered. "Do not complain now when it comes more apt to my hand than to yours. Now, look around you. None of your little friends knows what I'm talking about. Shall I explain it to them?"

"No!" The onrushing wall of force faltered as Thor looked hard at his sister and slumped slightly, resignedly at what he saw. His right hand clenched around Mjolnir, but his left rose to cover his eyes and rub the tension out of his forehead. Tiny stinging sparks of electricity crowded every surface in the room and snapped and stung when anyone moved, and Steve rubbed his fingertips together with a rising sense of wonder. Was this... victory? In all their thousands of rounds of enmity, in every real battle they'd ever fought, Loki had lost. Surely this wasn't the one she would actually win?

For a moment longer, stubbornly, Thor contemplated a future in which everyone knew he was as _argr_ as his _sister_. And then he sighed. "No, brother. Please. Do not do this to me, or to our family. Tell me what you want of me instead and I will give it to you, if I may."

Loki's expression was suffused with bewilderment, as though she couldn't believe she'd won either – as though she had long accepted that her lot in the universe was to be defeated over and over again, and she could not quite grasp what to do with success.

"Don't go signing away the Earth," Stark warned in the moment of suspense. "It's not yours to bargain with."

"He will want the throne," Thor said, looking at Tony with an expression of such self-doubt, such loss that Steve almost felt sorry for him. "That's right, Loki, isn't it? You want the throne of Asgard. You always have."

"I do not." In the braced and stunned silence of the sunny kitchen, with plates scattered on the floor and surrounded by half dressed Avengers, Loki moved to slip her hand into Steve's, allowing him, alone out of all of them, to feel how she trembled. "I want you to swear, Thor, that you will let no one, no one in all the nine realms, kill, ensorcel or otherwise destroy Steve Rogers. That you will protect him and his children and avenge him if you fail."

Disbelief on the faces of his friends, and Thor looked half reprieved half mystified. "This I would do of my own will. You did not need to—"

"Swear it!"

Thor broke out in a wide sunny grin and swore it. Steve used the frail hand in his to pull Loki to him and enfold her, his chest to her back, his chin resting on the top of her head, feeling the faint and hidden vibration of her anxiety through his skin. _Oh, honey._ He was worried for her – he really was – or he would have been if it were not for the fact that a great glossy bubble of joy was shouldering its way up out of his confusion and pushing everything else aside.

Because victory was so rare a thing for her she scarcely recognised it when it came, and still she'd handed this one entirely to him. Because she'd beaten Thor and had given up the chance of humiliating and torturing him until he wept. And she'd done that because she loved Steve more than she hated her brother.

"Sweetheart," he said, not giving a damn that Tony made a little gagging gesture at the word, "I don't need your protection either."

Her sideways smile was all for him, wicked, smug and proud. "Yet you shall have it, nevertheless."


	3. Chapter 3

A beat of silence. Steve had time to tighten his arms and feel the way she still shook in his embrace, as though the slight body could not fully contain her spirit, so rage and fear and exaltation were leaking out of her pores. Then Thor righted a chair and sat heavily down, Tony, Natasha and Bruce all began speaking at once, and Loki brushed her hands together, like a craftsman straightening up after finishing a tricky piece of work. She pushed Steve's encircling arms apart and stepped away from him, turning just enough so she could give him the same bright and breezy smile he'd used in Alfheim to cover up his apprehension, when he was waiting for Steve to punish him for stealing the crown.

"Right, then. You should be safe enough for me to leave you for a while. One more little thing to see to and then we can relax." She turned the fake cheer on the rest of the room, gave them all a wave. "Don't wait up."

With a twist of green light she was gone. Steve stood looking at the thin air into which she'd vanished, and the protests of his colleagues, both calm and shouted, bounced off him as if from his shield. No, he was not liking this. He knew Loki enough to believe that the less she told him the more he wouldn't like what he found out. The happier she looked, the more miserable she felt. And that any situation she called a "little thing" probably involved the opening of the gates of Hell and a whole massive bundle of hurt pouring out.

"... and you know Fury's going to go—"

"Shit!" Steve said, shocking them all into silence, like they'd never heard a soldier swear before. "How do I find out where she's gone?"

"Geez," Clint poured himself the remainder of the coffee, "you two really are joined at the hip, right? Like since when did we start worrying over whether Loki could take care of himself?"

Steve glared. "Since she was obviously planning something big. And if I know her, which I do—"

"Yeah, a little too close for comfort if you ask—"

"...then it's something that needs stopping. Tony? Thor? That teleportation thing she does, can it be followed?"

"Pft. I've had JARVIS running the algorithms for years. Nothing yet."

"Another sorcerer might—" Thor still sounded subdued, as though defeat had knocked some of the stuffing out of him. Steve tucked away a little feeling of satisfaction about that to be appreciated later, if there was still world or time to do it in.

"OK. Tony, get Strange on the phone, ask him to come over here and do his thing. I'm going to..." Steve wasn't a vain man, but under the yammer of panic it was still good to feel the others pick up his urgency and move to it. This marriage might have them all atwitter on the surface, but underneath they were still solid. They were still his team.

He put his hands on his hips in a hero pose he'd unconsciously adopted from his movie-star days, and belatedly realised he was commanding the troops in nothing more than a pair of blue stripy threadbare pajama trousers. So much for ego. "I'm going to go get dressed."

"I anticipated your call," Strange sat on the scuffed couch cross-legged, as if it was a pillar in the desert and he a holy man, remote and untouchable. But he had come at once, and he'd brought a sheaf of papers written over in two different hands. One, in ink that looked like blood, was cursive and copperplate. The other, in blue biro, was the spiky handwriting of somebody more used to runes.

"Indeed I might have sought you out myself, for Loki has just departed from my house. Where, I may say, I thought she could not enter. She requested my help with this," he spread the papers on the coffee table, showing page after page of closely written diagrams that made Tony's schematics look simple.

"It is a not-unchallenging spell of interdimensional transport, designed to take her not only to a different realm, but also to a different time."

Steve looked at the tight packed symbols and then up at Strange's saturnine face. He was a man of painful dignity from the streaks of silver in his dark hair to the perfect fall of the folds in his ridiculous cloak, but there was something about him – a little ozone tang, a spark of something wild in his dark eyes – that spoke of the way magic twisted its devotees to its own use and reminded him of Loki. 'Not unchallenging' for Strange meant 'would make a normal person bleed from the ears' but still...

"Loki wouldn't need help with something like that."

"My thoughts exactly," Strange smiled. "And when I contemplated this, it seemed to me that her only reason for asking for it would be so that someone would know where she had gone."

"Or could follow her?"

"Perhaps." A gracious nod as if to humour a child who had finally managed to tie its own shoelaces, and Steve guessed that 'incurable smartarse' was also something that came with the territory.

OK, so Loki wanted him to know where she'd gone, but not enough to outright tell him. Loki wanted him to spend time figuring it out so that when he did arrive it would be too late to stop her. She wanted him to know because she was afraid she was walking into a situation that was too big for her to handle alone. But she didn't want him to know because whatever it was she was doing was something not even she could argue him into approving.

He got an inkling of it then, like getting a bucket of ice water emptied over his head, pulled down his hood, picked up his shield and stood. "Can you send me there?"

"I can."

"Do it. Do it now, please."

It started with magic circles on the floor of the Avengers' common room and ended with the fabric of space and time being cracked open and Steve threaded through it like a skein of violet thread. His mind arrived first, conscious of golden sunlight on golden towers, everything huge, metallic, pristine, crushing with its grandeur. His artist's sensibilities saw at once where Loki got his elegance, where Thor got his brutal simplicity. Tony would love it - everything he saw was machined to perfection, bright, bold, open and on display.

No wonder shadowy Loki, closed, secret and subtle, had decided it was worth risking death by wormhole just to get away.

And now she'd come back willingly. Steve's body caught up with him, knitting together in an indescribable rush. He hit the golden floor running, burst around a golden corner and caught the flick of a forest green cloak as it turned into the huge, ornately carved doorway to Steve's left. Someone was speaking in there, a low, gloating rumble, like the sound of glaciers in the evening when they take another inch of land.

"...you will die by the hand of Laufey."

Loki's voice, as polished as the pillars around them "and you will die by the hand of—"

"No!"

A burst of speed to carry him through the wide entrance hall, and Steve skidded to a halt in the room itself, taking stock: A woman on the floor, unconscious amid the bodies of monsters, a massive sledge-like bed surrounded by golden light on which slumbered a white bearded man with one eye.

Stooping over him, the most forbidding of all the monsters, red eyed and crowned with horns, had just stilled in astonishment. Caught in the act of murder, his fist was encased in a dagger of ice poised above the sleeping man's throat, but he and Steve had both frozen, caught up in the struggle on the other side of the dais, where a furious younger version of Loki was trying to wrench his golden spear out of the hands of Steve's wife.

"What are you doing? Let me go! He will kill Father."

Oh, Steve's heart thought, instantly and wordlessly, when he looked at the boy. Steve was used to a Loki who had survived trial by the cosmos, relived a thousand lives, been shattered and put together again dark, mad, funny and maybe just a little bit at peace with his own nature. This boy had all that to come, and – to Steve's educated eyes – he was raw and desperate and terribly, terribly alone.

It didn't seem fair for him to have to fight himself too, but, "Let him," Steve's wife said, her lips pulled back from her teeth and her eyes narrowed. "Let him kill the old bastard for us."

"No!" But Loki in male form was stronger. He pushed her back, her feet slipping on the shiny gilded floor as she clung on tight and swore. "This is the _plan_. How can _you_ be getting in the way of the plan? You must know—"

"I know it fails. I know he breaks your heart _again_. I know there's no point in trying, and I know that five years in the future you'll be me and you'll want him dead."

The creature Steve had thought of as a monster, bigger than three men, indigo and fearsome, still held a hand almost gently on the sleeping god's throat, but his eyes, crimson and clever, followed the argument closely. Not a monster after all, but a person – a cautious one, if he had his enemy in his grip and still waited to find out what game he was enmeshed in before he struck.

There was something about his face, the wedge-like shape of it, the pointed chin, the clever, calculating look, even the little smile that said he was finding all of this quite fascinating...

Over by the wall, the younger Loki faltered. "Why?"

"Because we're married again. I know you haven't forgotten what happened to Ingjaldr, what happened to our children. We can avenge them now, and we can make sure the same thing doesn't happen again. If he dies, we are free to be happy. We will be loved and our children will live. Don't choose our kidnapper over that."

Young Loki looked over her shoulder to where Laufey knelt, weapon in hand, watching him, and their expressions were identical. Laufey, Steve thought, struck dumb by the family resemblance. Loki Laufeyjarson. How had Asgard not managed to see it earlier when it was written over both their faces in capital letters a mile high?

"Just let him kill Odin first and then you can kill him afterwards, in glorious and entirely justified revenge."

_Oh honey, your mind._

Laufey chuckled with a sound like a small avalanche, looked at Steve as if sharing the joke, and then clearly decided that if he was going down, his enemy was too. The blade in his hand lengthened and fined down. He pulled his hand back and went in for the killing blow.

Steve hurled himself forward, rammed the giant in the armpit the way he had taken on Thor, making his swing go wild. Cold struck through his costume and turned the breath to snow in his mouth as he pushed with all his super strength. The huge man slid a foot away from the bier, surprised as Steve would have been if the mosquito he'd tried to swat turned out to have tactical nukes aboard.

"No!" Steve yelled, coughing out ice. "Loki, you are not going to kill either of your fathers today. Not if I've got anything—"

"_Either_ father?" Even their voices were similar. Laufey pushed Steve away by the shield – the padding on its straps shattering and flaking away – and looked over to where both Lokis had turned in an instant truce and were levelling the long wicked pointed spear between them. "He stole my child as well as my casket? You... You are...?"

A searing blaze of light from the spear. Laufey held up a hand and a wall of ice came down between him and the rest of the room, the bolt reflecting off it and blasting a hole in the ceiling.

"I had anticipated some form of treachery, he said, twisting at a band of cold blackened metal on one of his bracers, "But not this." The universe drew apart where he was as if it was an oil painting being torn down the middle, and then it healed itself and he was gone.

Steve's Loki cursed in a long fluent flyting of obscenities and then raised her hands and made a cutting gesture, like a conductor silencing her orchestra. She stepped away from her younger self, leaving the look of crestfallen bewilderment frozen on his face. The running feet outside the doorway stopped. The recovering queen halted in her struggle to rise.

Loki looked up at Steve with beseeching eyes, a faint tremble of tears, a vulnerability that only he could soothe. An expression he'd have had to have a heart of stone to resist. It was a work of art, and Steve appreciated it as such. He sighed.

"I'm not angry with you, alright? So you can put that away."

The sorrow vanished, tucked away with all the other concealed weapons. "I have the right to avenge one husband's death and protect the life of another."

"Yeah," Steve remembered the story, thought he should have realised long before now that that was what all this was about. "_My father kept me in the house while the servant murdered my husband and children... I convinced myself I was grateful to him... After that I swore I would not sleep with anyone I would not as soon see dead."_

And then she broke her vow, with him, and had been running scared, desperate to keep him safe ever since. "Yeah, you do. Are you angry with me for stopping you?"

She smiled without her usual level of bullshit challenge. It was a fond smile, but it was also worryingly tired. "Why would I, when it was I who gave you the opportunity?"

OK, sometimes she did make his head hurt, but that was true. She'd laid the trail of breadcrumbs, he'd only followed it. "You... worked me into your plan not because you needed help, but because you knew I would stop you?"

"I wanted to give you the chance," she said and trailed a hand through the dome of golden sparks and smoke that drifted protectively over her father's head. "What good is it to acquire a conscience if you never let it speak?"

He pulled her close and she came gently, like all the fight had gone out of her, like she just wanted to go home, except she didn't have a home to go to that wasn't him. It was strange, touching his lips to hers to feel them neither teasing nor greedy, simply resigned. "But you're sad," he murmured in apology. "You're still sad."

"I hope it's enough," she said. "Death would have been surer."

And then she let out a high pitched, terrified squeal, and tried to recoil as the golden light atop the bier bulged and spilled. But Odin Allfather grabbed her wrist in a grasp that turned the skin white, opened one terrible blue eye and said, "Oh, you nasty little pervert. Not _again_."


	4. Chapter 4

The mythology did come to Steve's mind – weird hallucinatory snatches of this guy as the Gallows God, the Father of the Slain, the guy who gifted his followers with madness and inspiration, poetry and death. In another time he might have looked around for wolves. But even his patience had finally been stretched as far as it would go. He'd had it up to here with the casual insults, with standing by and watching her get hurt and leaving her to handle it herself.

"Excuse me, sir," he said because it didn't hurt to remember your manners even when you were blazing white with fury, "but I can't let you talk about my wife like that. I want you to let go of her now and apologise, or I'm going to have to take steps."

Odin pushed himself upright until he was leaning against the head of the bed like a backrest. He didn't, frankly, look all that recovered, his wrinkled face grey with tiredness. But his eye gleamed like the Fimbulwinter.

"Is he mad too?" he asked Loki, in an almost conversational tone – a tone that would have sounded fond if it had not been preceded by ground in contempt. "Or can he really be arrogant enough to have threatened the Terrible One, Odin Vidur, Lord of the Undead?"

"He's a hero of Midgard," said Loki, smiling. "You know what they're like."

There was a pause, during which both gods watched Steve with expressions of mild curiosity, and he felt like a talking rat, like a clever pet standing up on its hind legs and performing a hard learned trick. But while Odin stared, Loki took the chance to wriggle her hand out of his grip and step away, so Steve's humiliation came in handy for something. "I'm a citizen of the USA," he said sternly. "And if you don't want war with Midgard, you'd do well to remember that."

"Why in Borr's name," still that gentle, reasonable tone, and Steve might have relaxed if he hadn't already learned what gentle and reasonable meant when it came from Loki. "Would you think that Odin the Battle-Wolf wouldn't want war?"

"And that's what all of this is about, isn't it, _brother_?" Loki interrupted the glaring contest by perching daintily on the edge of the bier. Golden light licked against her back and the side of her face. Where it rested her image flickered restlessly through many variations – some male, some female, some red haired, some dark.

"Ah," Odin reached up and carded his gnarled fingers through her shapes, leaving echoes and lights. Looking almost wistful. "So you've remembered?" He brought his hands down and folded them in his lap. Looked back at Steve, differently, speculatively. "Is that how it starts, then? My final glorious battle while I have still the strength to wield a spear? To die not of old age, ignominious, in bed, but taken down by a foe worthy of me? It starts with this man's death? And you have brought him here to be slain?"

Steve shivered a little under this onslaught of mystical god stuff. They both felt remote to him, or he to they – a short lasting mortal blotch on this world of gilt – and a thousand old insecurities came clawing back past the serum, past his new life, reminding him what it was like being weedy and asthmatic and tiny in the face of uncaring strength. He half expected betrayal, even now.

"No!" Loki leapt to her feet like a cat doused in a bucket of water, crossed her arms under her breasts and scowled.

Steve should have known by now that Loki didn't do what he was expected to do.

"I've brought him here to tell you that I have married him, and I intend to live with him for the full span of his natural life. I'll give you your war to end all wars, but I want something out of this deal – something better than snake venom. You let me stay with Steve as long as he lives. A mortal life is what, sixty years, maybe? You'd sleep through that. Then we'll burn the worlds down between us. It'll be a good way to mourn."

"Don't be ridiculous, boy! What kind of a story would that be? What kind of glory would I get from fighting a _nithing_? From being defeated by some little mortal's _wife_?"

Loki tilted her head to one side, as if to allow the insults to run off. "You must take what you can get. I'll keep the marriage secret, if you wish. I'm good at that. I haven't told anyone about _your_ travels in skirts, yet, have I?"

Odin arose out of the bed like a mountain. Steve had never met anyone with so much presence – it seemed to fill the room beyond capacity and squash him like a bug against the walls. "And you never will. No, you're lying, and I think that if you love him that much, and I kill him, you will hate me for it. And, hating me, you will give me what I want sooner."

He put out a hand and the spear young Loki held – the youth himself a handsome statue still stuck in time suspension – snatched itself from the boy's fingers and thwacked into Odin's grasp.

Steve's wife hurled herself in front of him to shield him. As he grabbed her elbows to steady her, she shouted. "You will have to kill Thor!"

The butt of the spear clunked against the ground with a reverberating note like a kettledrum. "What?"

Loki's face was white and pinched. From the appalled look on her father's face, Steve thought this should be a moment of triumph, but her eyes were full of tears. "I made Thor swear on his honour to protect Steve, or avenge him," she explained.

"If you kill Steve, your own darling favourite son will kill you and be banished for the crime. _I_ will rule in Asgard. The Jotun runt will become an _argr_ emperor – how the nine realms will laugh at the almighty Aesir then – and I will strike your name from every record. No Ragnarok for Odin, no pyre of the entire universe to honour his fall. You will be forgotten, as though you had never existed at all."

The silence. It was as though even the atoms of the air held their breath. Loki turned around and buried her face in the crook of Steve's neck. He could feel her tears dampen his shirt, silent and abject, and he thought about his own dad, who had been a constant bastion of strength and support, iced his bruises with gentle hands, shored up his hopes and dreams with patient words. Triumph must taste very different when it was your own father's face you were grinding into the ground.

Odin sat carefully back on the edge of his bed, and looked almost regretfully at the slender, angry figure of his son, just starting out on his train-wreck of despair. He sighed. "Very well then. Have your toy for a while. When old age gets him, I will have my armageddon."

"Why do you make me hate you?" Loki said, thin and choked against Steve's collarbone. "I loved you. I would have given you this just to make you proud. Why-?"

Odin cut off the sentiment with a sharp gesture. "Because the end of the world is not a game."

"It could have been. We could have had fun with it. Why do you have to make it hurt?"

"It's my death, boy. No one's meant to laugh."

She straightened up, wiped her nose on her knuckles and giggled. On principle, Steve thought. "I will anyway."

Odin lay back down and the light closed once more over his head. But the sound of his voice was weary and a little fond. "Little bastard. I'm sure you will."

A tired gesture, creaky and infinitely practiced and all the frozen lives around them stirred back into motion. Odin closed his eye, sighed, and Steve felt something shove him in the small of his back. He staggered forwards and stumbled into the smaller of the two TVs in the Avengers' smaller living room. Deserted though it was, the sound of bickering from further down the corridor gave it a comfortable normality. Collapsing onto the couch, Steve waited for his thoughts to catch him up, as Loki drifted over to the windows and looked down on the scurrying nightlife of Manhattan.

That had been... weird. Steve could still feel the aura of love worn away to nothingness, ancient secrets so well shared that all the mystery had rubbed off. A strange sense that the two people arguing had once been so close they might as well have been one.

"So," he said, trying not to feel mortal and insignificant, failing utterly, "Am I right in thinking you just agreed to destroy the universe?"

She was tall, but slight and beautiful, and the light of billboards painted strange shades in those leaf green eyes – dry now and beginning to take on a glitter of private laughter. The term 'supervillain' didn't seem big enough to cover it, and Steve wondered what it was in him that was so bent out of shape that he _still_ wanted to hold her close and tell her everything would be OK – still wanted to give her the house with the porch and white picket fence, buy her dresses and paint her portrait and have kids together. Shapeshifting, semi-human, magical kids who played baseball and rode bikes and demanded a puppy. And were wiped out with the rest of the world when he died.

Loki passed one hand over the other the way he did when he was bringing the casket of ancient winters out of its hiding place. "I did," she said. "I agreed to spend your lifetime with you, and not to begin the end of all things until you were gone."

Her expression started as a smile, slippery-smug, grew to a grin of lightly insane proportions that blasted all Steve's concerns away with its self-congratulatory splendour. She twisted her wrist and held out to him something deep burnished gold. Something that smelled honey-ripe, summer strong. It was a golden apple, heavy as a heart in his hand – one of Idunn's apples that gave the gods their immortality, the sort that Loki had been stealing from the very earliest of the myths.

Steve took it with a kind of resignation. Also with a laugh. Really he should have spotted this one coming and been prepared.

"But of course, if you never die..."


End file.
